Media and Democrats apparently have no idea Trump’s financial disclosure forms are publicly available

“Mr. President, who do you owe money to?” the peacock network’s White House correspondent yelled at President Trump. “Don’t the American people deserve to know?”

A comprehensive breakdown of the president’s liabilities can be found in his 2019 public financial disclosure (see page 35), which was released this summer by the Office of Government Ethics. The institutions to which Trump owes a great deal of money include Ladder Capital Finance LLC, Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, Amboy Bank, and Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC.

Any other questions, Bennett?

If it is any consolation to NBC’s crackerjack White House reporter, he is not the only doofus this week to suggest Trump’s creditors are unknown. This is a thing that politicos and pundits have been doing since the New York Times published the first installment of its new series on Trump’s taxes.

The paper’s first report on the matter includes a paragraph that reads: “This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.”

From this passage, Democratic lawmakers and select members of the elite commentariat moved immediately to demand: To whom does Trump owe money?

“Who do you owe the money to?” asked 2020 Democratic vice presidential candidate and Sen. Kamala Harris of California. “And do you owe debt to any foreign nation? Do you owe anybody money who’s impacted by your decisions as president of the United States?”

Former national security adviser Susan Rice said elsewhere that Trump’s $421 million debt “is very much a national security concern … for the reason that we don’t know who has leverage over him.”

CNN contributor and former Clinton flunkie Paul Begala said, “First question in the debate has to be: ‘Mr. Trump: Your tax returns show you must repay $421 million in loans in the next four years. Who did you borrow the $421 million from?'”

“Who does the president owe $421,000,000 to?” asked failed presidential candidate and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

To whom, multilingual Rhodes Scholar guy.

“What does the president owe, and to whom does he owe it?” asked The Atlantic’s David Frum, repeating a question he does not appear to have investigated at all since first asking it in 2017.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon alleged elsewhere that Trump is debt $421 million “to potentially shady characters.” Who knew the senator felt so strongly about Deutsche Bank?

And so on and so on.

But we know where Trump owes money. That much is easily verifiable. If Buttigieg, Frum, and others want to know whether the president’s creditors are being used as a pass-through by third parties, then that is another very specific question entirely. Anyway, the bigger issue here is not Trump’s liabilities, but his revenues. The 2019 financial disclosure does not include detailed information on the sources of the president’s income, which jumped considerably that year. But the president’s idiot critics in media and politics are barely talking this week about his revenue streams. The straight-forward question “to whom do you owe money?” is the one they are asking, and it is easily answered. All it takes is just a few keystrokes.

You are not crazy, and you are not stupid. You did not miss something along the way. This “mysterious creditors” line is every bit as ignorant and lazy as it looks. The president’s 2019 financial disclosure forms are available online. Even an NBC reporter can find them if he tries hard enough.